Organizational Knowledge: The Relational Dimension

In the 1990s, knowledge management (KM), a discipline that uses advanced approaches to collaboration, learning and knowledge sharing along with culture change, began to coalesce, acquiring an independent identity forged from diverse sources including philosophy, psychology, economics and the social sciences, business theory, rationalization of work (Taylorism), cognitive sciences, organizational development, etc.

The coupling of organizational change and development methods with attempts to “manage” knowledge was, and remains, controversial.  KM weathered a stormy infancy in the 1990s, facing skepticism whether it should exist at all, and efforts by self-interested agents to influence its movement in directions they favored.  Today, KM still thrives as a turbulent storm of colliding discourses.  These collisions illustrate paradoxes at the core of organizational life. Some view KM as dividing into two grand discourses, one related to Information Technology and the other Organizational Learning.  I see a landscape of diverse discourses, among them the nature of organizational knowledge, ways of organizing around knowledge, and individual relationships within and to the organization.  For me, the most interesting of these, and the focus of this work, is the third discourse, concerning persons and relationships in organizations.  Early knowledge management efforts were exercises in “collection” of knowledge, viewed as an object.  Soon the discipline moved on to collaboration, and an “activity centric” model of knowledge use.  I hope to profile a third phase, knowledge as “connection.” This vision derives from the relational, constructionist view of knowledge.

The knowledge as connection notion confronts the modern organization with a paradox.  While organizations are increasingly complex, information centric and technological, they are also ever more dependent on basic human communication – conversation – as the fundamental source of new knowledge.  This paradox generates an opportunity to explore the following questions in my dissertation.

•    Since organizational knowledge is seen as largely implicit or tacit, in what sense can any organization be said to own knowledge? 
•    Given that leading organizations are constantly striving for new knowledge creation – i.e., innovation – what does the relational nature of knowledge mean for future organizations? 
•    How will this conception of intentional and personal collaboration for knowledge creation interface with the mindset of the traditional, modernist organization with its notions of proper “businesslike” relationships? 
•    Will organizational forms dissolve and deform under the collective weight of hierarchy’s impediments to knowledge flows? 
•    What needs to happen for knowledge intensive firms to evolve into increasingly fertile spaces for trust, conversation and deepening human relationship?  

At the present moment we cannot avoid the darkening shadow of economic and social events.  The possibility exists that powerful economic stressors may derail the utopian progression of organizations towards civility, deepening the violence of the collision between modernist and postmodernist discourse.